Common Pitfalls Companies Face with Kubernetes

In recent years, Kubernetes has become very popular among companies of different sizes, across various industries, and that’s all due to its effectiveness, high availability, and scalability.

It’s safe to say that it has become the backbone of modern cloud-native infrastructure because of all the things that were previously mentioned. Even though there’s no doubt that it’s very powerful and reliable, what you need to understand is that it is also full of intricacies.  

So, what does this mean exactly? It means that if you have little to no experience as far as this goes, you can easily make mistakes with it along the way. Since this topic isn’t explored enough, this guide will focus on the most common pitfalls and numerous ways you can tackle them.

It’s More Complex Than You Think

There’s a common misconception among inexperienced people that Kubernetes is extremely straightforward, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, there are certain managed services, such as Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and others that are designed to streamline things, but that surely doesn’t mean that working with Kubernetes is going to be smooth sailing.

Keep in mind that you won’t just run containers, but that you will also manage clusters, service discovery, security, and many other things, which can be very difficult to juggle. That’s precisely why it’s pivotal to have thorough knowledge about all of these components. When that’s not the case, you can easily end up with:

1. Architectures that are overly intricate
2. Puzzling troubleshooting scenarios
3. Ineffective resource allocation

Now, the question is, what can be done to prevent all these issues? For starters, you should consider hiring specialized external assistance, such as MeteorOps Kubernetes services, to help you properly deploy and manage this. Apart from that, it wouldn’t hurt to invest some time and money in the proper DevOps training. 

If your team is relatively knowledgeable when it comes to Kubernetes, the risks of making any errors are going to be significantly reduced.

Ignoring Liveness & Readiness Probes

Some businesses fail to realize how essential probes are. In fact, they are the ones that make your applications a lot more resilient. They provide all the necessary information regarding the health of the Pods.

Furthermore, liveness probes let Kubernetes know when it’s supposed to restart a container due to a particular problem. It enables malfunctioning containers to be replaced in situations when they are no longer functioning properly, yet they still haven’t stopped themselves. 

On the other hand, readiness probes showcase when a container is able to accept traffic from a service, making sure no failure occurs during application startup.

Security Problems

Companies that take things seriously in terms of security will do whatever is necessary to safeguard their data, because they know how detrimental it can be for them if some of it is stolen or lost.

That’s something that can seriously negatively impact their reputation, forcing them to deal with lost clients, customers, hefty fines, potential lawsuits, etc. With Kubernetes, protecting clusters, CI/CD pipelines, and networks at scale can easily become too demanding, particularly if you do not have the right tools and expertise on hand.

Production Kubernetes deployments are supposed to be constantly secured. This refers to container vulnerability reporting, namespace supervising, container image scanning, and security audits.

If by any chance a certain problem arises, you need to immediately resort to remediation systems to effectively address the issue, figure out what’s causing it, and most importantly, repair it in a timely manner (the sooner, the better).

This is the best-case scenario; however, oftentimes, firms do not implement all the necessary measures, which makes them even more susceptible to different sorts of threats and vulnerabilities, which are capable of taking down even the most powerful Kubernetes initiatives. 

Resource Management & Overspending 

Those who have worked with Kubernetes will tell you that it can truly optimize resources impeccably; however, in order to accomplish this, you need to configure it the right way, which is rarely the case with a lot of companies.

Namely, most of them have the tendency to either underprovision or overprovision resources. It’s easy to believe that throwing more CPU at workloads is going to fix every issue, but what you need to keep in mind is that ineffective cluster sizing can cause uncontrolled cloud bills.

One of the things that you can do to prevent this from happening is to utilize Vertical Pod Autoscalers and Horizontal Pod Autoscalers wisely.

As stated in the beginning, Kubernetes is truly omnipotent, but it’s far from perfect, which is something that organizations must always have in the back of their minds if they want to avoid making any huge mistakes.